Martinelli furniture, designer architecture, manicured lawns and pool bar were the foreground; and somewhere out on the sea on which we gazed, the Russian Black Sea fleet had been mobilised against Georgia.

Thus we sat amid the surrounds of a luxury resort near Kavarna, along what I may be tempted to call the Golf Coast, going by the developments advertised on the billboards along the road.

There was cable television to keep us briefed, with the BBC inevitably offering the most sober coverage; the thousands of civilian dead claimed by south Ossetian rebels was put in quotation marks by the Beeb, yet reported as bald fact by CNN. Sky News, again was on the somewhat more histrionic side. Sky divided its time between the Georgia crisis and the Olympic saga, in which it seemed to believe there was only a British team competing.

Unfortunately, unlike a hotel we stayed in last year, there was no English-service Russia Today channel, which would have served up the Kremlin view undiluted, unedited and uncritically.

A day or two later, on Varna's south beach, the story continued to dominate conversation. A friend said that some in the US media were reporting that just two weeks earlier, president Bush had given Saakashvili an assurance that Washington would guarantee the security of the Tbilisi government. If such an assurance really was given, Bush was a fool to give it (nothing surprising about that) but Saakashvili was an even bigger fool to believe it.

Even for journalists, long leave at the seaside somewhat melts the impulse for constant news. Rene Beekman has written just days ago in The Sofia Echo about pursuing the phantom of Wi Fi. Several resorts' newsstands offer at best only Bulgaria's difficult-to-believe dailies, and no seaside bar would dare to tune its cable television to anything but music and fashion channels and these days, the Olympics.

This is not an entirely bad thing. A seaside holiday of three weeks is a trip to the real Bulgaria, away from the fatuous optimism of Cabinet ministers and heads of state agencies, away from statistics of questionable value, away from a capital city that values arcane political gamesmanship more than the reality of lives of Bulgarians.

The subject of the destructive pattern of development along Bulgaria's Black Sea coast is nothing new, and need not be the subject of much further discussion here. That over the past three weeks we have seen a handful of developers continuing to work in defiance of the supposed ban on construction during the summer season is hardly news.

Negative coverage of Bulgaria's tourist resorts and facilities in the foreign media is unfortunate in unduly emphasising the shortcomings of this country in particular, but Bulgaria has done itself no great service - pun intended - in deploying serving staff that are, in the main, somewhere between hostile and apathetic, and certainly unsuited to a trade that calls itself the hospitality industry.

And yes, to cite another colleague from The Sofia Echo, Magdalena Rahn spoke for many of us in writing recently about those who persist in venturing in English when one is speaking Bulgarian. I know that in most cases people who continue in English do so out of goodwill, but it is sometimes annoying to go through a conversation, from ordering food to renting an umbrella, with myself speaking Bulgarian and other party speaking English.

Another area in which Bulgaria is determined to plunge the dirk into its own belly is the question of pricing. This extends in some cases to room tariffs, and in other cases to prices at restaurants and taverns. Today at Albena I was charged 10.50 leva for two colas and an ice tea, about triple the sum that I have paid in the past three weeks elsewhere. At the place next door, we found out, the same three items would have added up to about 13 leva.

This, in a resort in mid-August which boasts a large number of unhired umbrellas, vacant expanses of sand and place to park, meaning - the numbers of visitors do not match those of previous years. Driving into the resort, a very informal and unscientific count showed almost every second car to have Romanian licence plates.

Those whose countries use the euro and sterling are no longer here in the numbers that they used to be. Those carrying lei may tire of being fleeced as well.

At the place where I bought the two colas and the ice tea, I queried the total payable and in response was shown the cash register receipt (oh right, it must be okay, because those are the figures you typed in). I told the attendant (in Bulgarian): "Foreigners are not all stupid and are not all rich. I am not coming back".

Of course I am, barring Divine decree otherwise, in the summer of 2009, unless we too join Bulgarian holidaymakers' defections to Greece and Turkey. Then again, given the trends of the past few weeks, it may be even easier to find a nice spot on a Bulgarian Black Sea beach or in a hotel. Given other regional trends, we may even be able to watch the Russian navy on manouevres, not far off the coast.

See also OFFLINE: Inaccessible connectivity and RANDOM: A week